Telephony communications have traditionally been provided by the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which remains dominant in providing telephony services using circuit-switched connections. The PSTN continues to provide the highest quality of service levels for telephony communications and extends to a vast majority of the population. With the ever-increasing availability and quality associated with voice-over-packet (VoP) technologies, there is a movement towards providing telephony communications in association with various types of media services via packet-switched networks.
An increasing number of households and businesses have both PSTN connections through telephony lines, such as plain old telephone system (POTS) lines, as well as broadband access over packet-switched networks to provide access to the Internet, file transfer, streaming media, and the like. Although the PSTN provides a high quality of service, broadband access quality is continuing to increase and has reached a level at which voice communications are of an acceptable quality. As such, VoP communication terminals are capable of establishing a communication session between them over a packet network to support a voice call. These VoP communication terminals are generally associated with packet network addresses and are generally not associated with traditional directory numbers. Establishing calls between PSTN-based telephones and VoP communication terminals is difficult, if not impossible. When such calls are possible, significant interaction between the PSTN and the packet networks is required. Further, since most of the VoP communication terminals do not have PSTN directory numbers, initiating a call from a POTS-based telephone is again difficult, if not impossible.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient and cost effective technique to allow a POTS-based telephone to initiate call to a VoP communication terminal. There is a further need to minimize the interworking required between the PSTN and packet networks to facilitate such calls. There is yet a further need to initiate these calls without requiring the VoP terminal to be associated with a directory number.